page_title: Santos-Dumont Demoiselle
section_title: No. 19
hierarchical_section_title: Santos-Dumont Demoiselle / No. 19
context_page_description: The Santos-Dumont Demoiselle was a series of aircraft built in France by world aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont. They were light-weight monoplanes with a wire-braced wing mounted above an open-framework fuselage built from bamboo. The pilot's seat was below the wing and between the main wheels of the undercarriage. The rear end of the boom carried a tailwheel and a cruciform tail. The name is a synonym for "jeune fille"—young girl or woman—but also the common name in French for a Damselfly.
context_section_description: The first aircraft of the type was the Santos-Dumont No. 19, which was built to attempt to win the Grand Prix d'Aviation offered for a one kilometre closed-circuit flight.  Powered by a 15 kW (20 hp) air-cooled Dutheil & Chalmers flat-twin engine mounted on the leading edge of the wing, it had a wingspan of 5.1 m. (16 ft 9 in), was 8 m (26 ft 3 in) long and weighed only 56 kg (123 lb) including fuel. It had a pair of hexagonal rudders below the wing on either side of the pilot, a forward mounted hexagonal elevator in front of the pilot and a cruciform tail which, like the boxkite-style canard surfaces on the earlier 14-bis biplane of 1906, pivoted on a universal joint to function both as elevator and rudder mounted at the end of a substantial single boom.  There was no provision for lateral control.  The undercarriage consisted of a pair of wheels in front of the pilot and a third behind, supplemented by a tailskid.
  Santos-Dumont made three flights on 17 November 1907 at Issy-les-Moulineaux.
  Later, Santos-Dumont made a number of modifications: he repositioned the engine, placing it below the wing in front of the pilot, fitted a different propeller and removed the forward elevator and rudders.
caption: No.19 as first built
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